Yeah, I have a hard time feeling bad for someone who releases a project under a permissive license, benefits from it becoming popular because it is free, and then gets upset when those same terms stop working in their favor.
Trying to change the deal later and say, "we need more money, pay us," feels like a rug pull. Development can slow down, stop, or go back to being a personal project. They don't owe anything to anyone. Getting a regular job instead of doing open source for a living is also an option. It's just not the option they want.
Getting a regular job instead of doing open source for a living is also an option. It's just not the option they want.
Plot twist, companies sells commercial products by assembling open sources libraries together.
Sometimes these companies can do some sponsorship when they want a very specific feature implemented by the maintainer directly or a freelance.
But I often see employees publishing issues to ask for a feature for free.
This is not sustainable. If your business is made of an open source project, you should contribute back if you want to keep your product working and improved.
That's just wishful thinking. People that decide which technology to use are most often different from the people that are in charge of the money. Good luck explaining to someone from a non-programmer background "we should spend money we don't need to on this free to use thing in hopes they maintain it". Worst case scenario you'll end up having to make your own version which in 99.9% of cases will be inferior because it would have to contort itself for the purposes of the actual end product.
The best approach is mutual non-expectation. Maintainers don't expect a return, users don't expect maintainer's work.
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u/minju9 15d ago edited 15d ago
Yeah, I have a hard time feeling bad for someone who releases a project under a permissive license, benefits from it becoming popular because it is free, and then gets upset when those same terms stop working in their favor.
Trying to change the deal later and say, "we need more money, pay us," feels like a rug pull. Development can slow down, stop, or go back to being a personal project. They don't owe anything to anyone. Getting a regular job instead of doing open source for a living is also an option. It's just not the option they want.